


Transitional

by Ylixia



Category: The Bourne Legacy (2012)
Genre: F/M, Get Together, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 13:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2813846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ylixia/pseuds/Ylixia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Are we lost?  I was kind of hoping we were lost."</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [andibeth82](https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/gifts).



The next six months are like an indrawn breath, like the silence after the final swell of music, like the stillness of the audience before the dancer's spell breaks and they burst into tumultuous applause. They are anticipation, exhilaration, and a single question repeated with every heartbeat, every crash of the ocean, every burst of color celebrating a new day and every purple-tinged diamond-studded sigh as the old one fades away;

What next?

* * *

They get as lost as Aaron can bear to let himself be. He knows where each tiny pocket of civilization is, he knows where to go to avoid the towering beach resorts on some of the islands, and on clear nights he can guide himself easily by the stars and what he remembers of the map he poured over on that small fishing boat. For once, however, he doesn't feel an urgency to be anywhere other than where he is, and Marta seems inclined to agree with him.

He'd known she was beautiful, once, back when he'd still thought of such things, before her cool professional manner and his growing bitterness had pushed all the whimsy out of his mind.

She is radiant now, arms flung wide, face tipped back to drink in the sun, spinning in the sand and sea as her hair flies around her face. On an island paradise with their only transportation sailing steadily into the horizon and civilization a good five-hour hike away, Aaron thinks he's never been surrounded by such beauty before.

He thinks he finally knows what happiness feels like.

* * *

They go to a little fishing village close enough to the tourist traps that their presence will go unremarked upon, but far enough so that the chances of discovery are acceptably low.

Still, they don't stay too long and Aaron gets the bare minimum of survivalist gear they might need; in these lush, warm little tropical islands he's pretty sure he could survive half-dead and naked without too much trouble, but there's no reason to make things unnecessarily hard for them.

In the window of one of the kitschy tourist shops there is a bathing suit with a filmy little wrap skirt. Marta's eyes linger on it as they pass and that's reason enough for Aaron to step into the little store and buy it for her.

When she protests, he brushes it off and says “Honestly it's more of a present for me, anyway.”

Marta laughs incredulously and punches him in the arm, but she doesn't protest anymore and she doesn't stop smiling for the rest of the day.

* * *

Aaron teaches Marta how to survive in the wild, how to tell poison plants from edible, how to set traps and track game. He teaches her how to find water and make a shelter, how to find wood for a fire and build it, how to fish and how to clean and cook their own food.

Marta is a voracious learner and smart as hell. She drinks in what he teaches her and looks for more. Her hands are precise and focused on each task and it's not long before he can rely on her for some things just as well as he could himself. He's not surprised about any of this and loves the way her eyes light up when he tells her so.

He teaches her self defense, the kind that starts with a good offense, and this she takes a little longer to pick up. She's never lived with violence the way he has, and she's a little timid in her movements and has trouble getting her limbs to go where she wants them in the way she wants them. He can see how much it frustrates her not to pick up a new skill right away, and Aaron has to keep reminding her to slow down, not to injure herself. It'll come.

It does, and in the meantime they play games where they track each other in the island forests, leaving each other notes and clues of increasing complexity. Once, they chase each other over five days and three different islands, and they only stop when Marta swoops into his arms wearing the bathing suit he got her and kisses him.

“I was lonely,” she says cheekily, and Aaron thinks maybe he should have seen this coming.

He smiles down at her and kisses her back.

* * *

On one of their supply runs a woman collapses in the street. Her daughter screams and shakes at her shoulder and Marta rushes over to help.

“She's a doctor,” Aaron repeats, in as many languages as he thinks it likely he'll be understood in. The crowd parts and lets her through, and eventually the young girl leads them to their home, Aaron helping support the ill woman along the way.

An hour later Marta says “I've done what I can, but she needs medicine.”

“Tell me what you need,” Aaron says, and Marta looks at him searchingly for a few beats. She knows that he knows that obtaining what she needs legally in this part of the world is somewhere between “impossible” and “prohibitively expensive”.

Eventually she nods and gives him the list. When he returns with what she needs she gives him a tired, grateful smile and doesn't ask any questions.

* * *

Aaron procures a tiny sailboat from an old man in exchange for a days labor doing odd jobs around his house. The man says the boat used to belong to his boys, and now they are gone and married and he's too old to be sailing anymore.

The waters around the islands that have been their home for some months now is quiet, and Marta takes to sailing quicker and with more enthusiasm than anything he has taught her so far. She sits fearlessly at the prow of the boat and lets the wind run through her hair. She only laughs when Aaron catches a good wind and the whole vessal tilts dramatically. She looks like a sea goddess, shining and bright and almost too beautiful to behold.

Almost.

* * *

Aaron has a good voice for singing, but not much beyond that. Marta learned a little ballroom dance in college but hasn't done it since. At night next to a crackling fire on the beach, there's no one around to hear Aaron's wavering notes or see their fumbling steps.

“You're just too good to be true,” Aaron croons in Marta's ear as they sway together. She rests her head on his chest and doesn't seem to mind at all that he is just ever so slightly off-key.

“Can't take my eyes off of you...”

* * *

Word spreads about the white doctor and her friend who will give proper medical care and ask nothing more in return than a meal, if you can spare it. Aaron worries about people talking, but the villages they go to seem generally disinclined to talk to outsiders, and when Aaron takes the risk to press for the need for secrecy they accept his words readily.

Still, they gain a reputation among the locals for their ability to acquire resources that would be largely out of reach for them. They seem to think that Marta and Aaron are being aided by spirits who demand secrecy as a condition for their help.

Aaron figures that that's true enough. The spirits of Anonymity and Luck have been keeping them safe for a long while, but they are fickle allies indeed.

* * *

Marta begins to feel self conscious of the hair on her legs, under her arms, and between her legs. “I haven't shaved in nearly six months,” she complains. “It's a jungle down there.”

“Stop it, you're beautiful,” Aaron says, scratching his beard into her neck to make her giggle, and then setting himself to the task of showing her exactly how beautiful he finds her.

* * *

During the next supply run, Marta picks up a razor. Aaron follows suit, in solidarity.

* * *

A little boy dies in Marta's care.

Aaron missed the window needed to save him by about an hour, trying to hunt down the expensive and rare drugs she needed.

“This is ridiculous!” She yells, throwing the little bottle of pills across the room. “A hundred miles away they make every drug known to mankind, and _none_ of it comes here? People here get sick and suffer so that halfway around the world the American government can fuck around with genetics and making deadlier soldiers? Is that it? Is that the world we live in?”

It is, and Aaron has known that for a while, but it doesn't surprise him that the realization comes to such a shock for Marta. He gathers her in his arms and she fights him for a moment before giving in, collapsing against him.

This time last year Marta was using drugs and reagents and chemicals that cost a thousand dollars a milligram with barely a thought. Now she doesn't even have reliable access to penicillin.

Aaron strokes her back and comforts her and doesn't judge her for the person she used to be, or how hard it's hitting her that she doesn't have those resources anymore. He knows what it's like to have the tools you need to survive taken from you.

* * *

There come a few weeks where Marta is quiet and sullen. She is not angry or mean to him, but she is quiet. She's less interested in sparring, or going over the bits of tradecraft he can teach her in this place so far removed from the urban sprawl of the rest of the world. She doesn't sing with him, or dance, or offer to go sailing, and they go about their daily routine in silence.

“Is this it?” she asks one day. “Is this our lives now?”

“What do you mean?” Aaron asks, surprised. This is the first time she's spoken today.

“I didn't do a lot in college,” she says, seemingly out of nowhere. “I didn't make many friends, I stayed in and I studied and I busted my ass to get in my grad school program, and then I busted my ass to get my MD-PhD.”

She's not looking at him, talking quickly and angrily, and Aaron looks at her with growing alarm.

“For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to do research. I wanted to make discoveries that would push humanity into the future. I wanted to be a part of something amazing, something that would help people, do something that no one else could do.

“ _Is this it_?” She yells at him. “After all of that, after all of that school, and that learning, is this how I live my life? Walking along beaches and fishing and watching little boys die in front of me who wouldn't have even missed a day in school if they'd been lucky enough to be born in America? Is that all I am now?”

“Marta...” Aaron says, reaching out to her, trying to draw her close, but she jerks away.

“I want to do science,” she says, her voice thick with tears. “I want to be in a lab, I want to write grant proposals, I want to do all of that awful boring busywork. I want to publish, and discover new things, and make new friends.” she starts crying in earnest now. “I want to see my sister, I want to see my _family_ , I want – ”

She cuts off, tears coming too harshly now for her to speak through. This time when Aaron reaches for her she leans into him instead of pulling away, and he strokes her hair as she cries.

He'd thought the fear was the worst. The terror in her eyes as she realized how out of depth she was as he dragged her halfway across the world. He'd thought the nervous way she darted her eyes about her surroundings, the way she held herself stiff and small every time he walked away from her, was the worst thing he could watch her suffer through.

But this is so much more awful, this realization that everything she worked toward, everything she ever was, went up in flames. The fear had nothing on the realization that she had lost herself., her life, her dreams, through no fault of her own and with no way to get them back.

Aaron holds her and wishes he could find something to say, anything at all. Because he'd come out of that mess with everything he'd ever wanted; a strong body, a sound mind, freedom from all the strings they had wrapped around him, to tie him in place. It had never occurred to him to seek any kind of life other than this.

“I'm not really good at wanting things,” Aaron says slowly when Marta's tears dry up. She looks up at him curiously. “Before... everything, I'd mostly just wanted to not be a burden, and to not be around people who would hurt me. And then in the program, well. Wanting things wasn't exactly going to do me any good, so I just... didn't.”

He looks down at her and smiles and wipes tenderly at her face. She smiles tentatively back. “You want to do what you love, and have family and friends, right?”

She nods. “Yeah.”

“That's good,” Aaron says musingly. “Those are good things to want. Maybe I can help with that.” He's already turning it over in his mind, how he'd go about it, which countries are most likely, how much danger they'd be in. He feels a thrill of excitement in his chest as he brings together the first few scraps of a game plan.

“Really? How? Why?”

“Why?” Aaron says, looking at her incredulously. “Because I love you, you dummy.”

Marta blinks, then smiles, then kisses him, then laughs and kisses him again. “But I thought you liked it here?” she says, unable to hide her relief under her concern.

Aaron just shrugs. “I like it here, sure. But I like you more. Besides,” he smiles. “I should work on wanting things. It's probably good for me.”

Marta tackles him into the sand and she's bright and beautiful and happy in his arms again. They kiss and make love under the stars and curl up together to watch the sun rise.

“This has been a good vacation,” Aaron says musingly. He'd never had a vacation before.

“The best,” Marta agrees. “What are we going to do now?”

“What people do when they come back from vacation.”

“Mm?”

“Get back to work.”


End file.
